Seriously, this is the responsibility consumers have in a free market. If there's behavior you don't like, move on. You don't get to complain about bad actors when you're literally keeping them in business.
Edit: Oh, YC backed Instacart. Got it :)
It's trivial to verify that this is standard HN moderation:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Consumers have enough parameters to optimize for: price of groceries, cost of delivery, fair trade, availability of products, delivery speed, convenience, availability of delivery slots, the list is long.
Consumers are relatively good at optimizing for cost, not perfect -- but asking for more than that is unrealistic.
Learning to empower one's self is a skill we could benefit from teaching in society. Unfortunately, our primary education systems are not oriented toward teaching autonomy. They teach independence & compliance, which is false separation (since we're interdependent, not independent) and giving up power to others, respectively.
There is litterally no other way to have a democraty that to make your day to day actions matter. Each citizen has to have a life directed to create a society.
Now I understand how hard it is. And I don't blame people for failing at it, me included. But as long as we label it as unrealistic, it stops all hope of progress.
No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.
That's always the case. If you recycle, you are at a competitive disadvantaged compared to people who don't care. If you are veggie as well. Or if you help your kids to do their homework.
Do you think it's unreasonable to promote recycling ?
It's not a binary choice, it's a spectrum anyway.
> No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.
Regulations are very slow, subject to intense lobbying and conflicts of interest, and assume people in charge are benevolent and compentent.
Regulations are not the base of the society. They come, they go. They change according to the time, the context, the place... People are what's matter.
Again, I understand how hard this is. I also notice that a lot of people don't want to hear about it, because of the resonsibility it involves. But power to the people cannot comes without responsability to the people.
And responsability only truely work if it's chosen, not enforced.
Swedes don't just love recycling; the government makes it worthwhile by increasing the cost of not-recycling (fines, jail time).
But it probably goes both way, and I don't see a good reason to not do both: acting as micro and macro citizen.
The instacart topic is just an example. An example saying, "if your economic system is currently capitalistic, and based on money, then voting with your wallet makes sense".
> I understand that it's hard, but try to imagine
That's so condescending.
> a world where workers can demand a living wage and not have to rely on the generosity of "good people" for the right to live.
Life is not binary, you can work on both. But your solution delegate the action to a small 3rd party, so it's still an oligarchy.
I was quoting you from the previous comment
Calling for personal responsibility is a good way to misdirect attention.
People are entitled to their individual choices. If it's too much information to process, they can individually choose someone they delegate their decision making to. One way they do this is to trust a particular certification and only buy products with the certification seal. But each individual should get to choose which party plays the role of delegate for them.
Resorting to one-size-fits-all regulatory/union monopolies shows a lack of imagination that deprives individuals of their agency and breeds corruption/rent-seeking-behaviour.
As for this case, it's pretty clearly theft, and should be dealt with accordingly by the legal system. Customers/workers shouldn't have to band together to punish theft.
Even in tech you have paper CCNA who don't know anything, but have a piece of paper saying they're certified.
You're also saying in this case it is theft, and should be handled by the legal system, which in part is legislated by labor regulations.
1. https://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/History/ProductRegulation/ucm13...
There's nothing that makes giving an entity like a union or regulatory agency a monopoly that makes it more competent. There's no advantage in monopolizing a market under one quality assessor.
We essentially did that with credit ratings, by creating a special class of credit ratings agencies, that only three firms fall under, and making regulatory requirements requiring participants to receive a passing rating from one of them to be allowed to engage in various market activities.
The result in a non-competitive credit ratings industry with profit margins of approximately 40%, meaning they're extracting a massive amount of economic rent.
>>You're also saying in this case it is theft, and should be handled by the legal system, which in part is legislated by labor regulations.
I'm not endorsing those aspects of the legal system that prohibit contractually agreed terms. Only tort should be punished by the legal system.
Personal responsibility is required in a good society, irrespective of the system of government or the level of regulation that currently exists. Even if it's consumers/voters pushing their legislators to build regulations, you need a mass of regular old people who care in order to change a society.
Then the onus is on you to prove that regulation of an issue--say, drinking and driving--didn't just happen to coincide with a national education campaign coming from a well-funded 501(3)(c). Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much.
In my opinion, the problem here isn't regulation vs. collective action people like grand-OP who are willing to continue using the service. Those same people will push back against legislation if they believe it will increase their prices, or eliminate the service altogether (Uber/Lyft in e.g. Austin?)
And in any case, consumer-driven action is MUCH faster than regulation. You can boycott them TODAY and cause an actual hit to their bottom line.
However, laws and independent bodies specifically created for the purpose of regulating industry and researching consumer effects are much better than people at finding out the broad effects of company practices. They are specifically reviewing and analysing company practices and making targeted recommendations on effective regulation.
For me, relying on consumer driven action is ineffective, it certainly should be a part of any society, but with the pace of society today, you can't rely on people to be able to have the time, information and energy to vote with their wallets - especially when it often hurts their wallet to do so. Governments and independent bodies have to lead the way with the support of people. I'm painfully aware of being privileged with the time and wealth to be able to vote with my wallet, but I think the majority of people have neither for most of these boycotts.
I'm constantly reminded of a short blurb/study-abstract I read a little while back that found the chief determinant of whether people perceived the taxes they paid were 'fair' was perceived compliance of everyone else. That is, it was more important that everyone else was paying whatever their fair share was, than exactly what my own particular rate is.
Thus you can get people to vote for things that might hurt them a little, that they wouldn't do on their own, as long as they know that everybody else will fairly share in the burden.
But it's a great way to put the onus on the consumer and not blame the cause - the government or multinational.
EU or US regulation on the other hand could probably have Nestle ceasing that practice in days.
We hire people to grow our food because it is a better optimisation of labour, not because we can just forget about the process of growing food. We need to be aware of things like: is this food processing sanitary, is the farm run by ethics that we agree with, is the environmental impact acceptable, is this food then best thing to grow in this environment (eg: growing cotton and rice in the desert makes no sense at all).
We then exercise choice by hiring people who best match our criteria.
When the only criteria we filter by is cost, we throw everything else out the window: ethics, ecological sustainability, economic viability, morality, food safety: everything.
Regardless of whether it is a good or bad practice to rely upon, in any capacity, the moral action of consumers generally, the fact still remains for the individual that if they have learned a provider they are using is acting immorally, they have a choice to contribute to and reward that or not. Even if it is terrible to rely upon this on a social scale, it does not absolve you of moral culpability for your own actions. Everything else aside, if you know such a thing, you still made the choice to contribute to a thing you claim to not agree with. It creates a bit of dissonance, where your professed moral beliefs are not reflected in your actions. And that's something that plays a role in your own evaluation of self even if others don't learn of your actions and judge you for them.
I disagree that collective action is impossible. Consumers become aware of problems, eg. high fructose corn syrup, and act accordingly, eg. buying less sugary junk. Cultural change is slow-moving but it starts with people giving a shit.
Are we actually doing that? I've seen / heard little evidence that our trend on sugar is moving in a healthy direction, at least in the US.
Is this true?
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-boycotts-history-201802...
Go ahead, try to organize a boycott. I'll support it. I guarantee you it won't go anywhere, though.
> Pressure increased across the country. The related civil suit was heard in federal district court and, on June 4, 1956, the court ruled in Browder v. Gayle (1956) that Alabama's racial segregation laws for buses were unconstitutional. As the state appealed the decision, the boycott continued. The case moved on to the United States Supreme Court. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling, ruling that segregation on public buses and transportation was against the law.
For the most part. It depends on your perception of a boycott. Very, very few boycotts are adopted by a significant fraction of the customer base. I've participated in plenty of boycotts. Only one of them resulted in a change in behavior. The rest were ignored by both the company and the majority of their customers.
For the most part, the value of a boycott is helping me sleep at night - not in actually solving the underlying problems.
It looks like you're drawing a conclusion based on an absence of evidence of what people aren't doing anymore.
It's not possible with an attitude like that. There is no government action that is forcing you to buy from Instacart.
>Boycotts essentially never work.
Tell that to Birmingham, Alabama.
>Not only that, but who are you going to use instead of instacart: Amazon Fresh? Uber? Or will you drive yourself to the store and buy it from minimum wage employees who work unstable hours?
Whataboutism and false dichotomy. There are many places that sell groceries that pay their workers more than minimum wage. Do a little research and give them your business. Or start your own grocery story if there's really a demand for something like this.
>Also, what do you think the working conditions were like for whoever picked that asparagus?
We can be concerned about more than one thing at a time.
I'm wondering what could be possible if a group of people (say, some in prison?) started saying "We peacefully revoke consent to be governed this way and request immediate transformative justice in the form of a justice system that allows us to craft our own path to recover from the wounds inflicted upon us by ourselves, our family, and our society free from imprisonment."
The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it's very brightly colored, and it's very loud, and it's fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don't worry; don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we … kill those people. "Shut him up! I've got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real." It's just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn't matter, because it's just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
I choose to collaboratively, peacefully, and fluidly coevolve with all life by mindfully embodying science and art, in love to identify ways to sustainably contribute to all life's needs.
Would you be willing to give me feedback on how I might evolve it further?
You do have to be careful with that sort of language, we have a bit of a history of nailing people to trees or shooting them for suggesting such things.
Edit: fixed a word.
If that's not what you meant, can you please clarify?
Expecting some sort of change to come from spontaneous, collective consumer action is ridiculous. This is especially true when most consumers in America are not on financially stable ground themselves, and can't afford to spend more money or time to assuage their guilt.
Does that mean you believe that collective consumer action had absolutely nothing to do with Travis no longer remaining as CEO of Uber?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-ceo-travi...
These things never start from the poorest doing these things though. They start with the middle and upper classes, because the do have the money, and companies chase that money.
Yes if everyone rolled over and did nothing, instcart would win.
What percentage of that richer demographic would have to switch to a competitor for it to start hurting? A demographic that includes journalists and 'influencers', that are willing and able to pay more, and are able to tell the world about it?
No, I will get on a bus operated by union-organized employees and travel to a grocery store where employees are also covered by a union and inside the city limits of a city with a reasonable minimum wage and scheduling rules inside a state with mandated paid sick leave. While there, I will likely pay a bit more than if outside those borders but the people involved in the process will be getting treated minimally well.
People crap on what cities like Seattle and states like Washington are trying to do as “socialist” or “a nanny state,” but workers are humans who deserve to be treated well and “the market” seems terrible at that if left to its own devices.
Borderline living wage, but a lot better than being exploited by some BS company like InstaCart.
In addition, it's difficult to have empathy for a situation you've never experienced yourself. For every ethical consumer who knows how shitty these jobs are and makes decisions on that basis, there are many who either either unaware, don't think too much about it, or don't care because of the companion narrative of "they knew what they were signing up for".
In the final analysis, "vote with your dollars" often ends up being a defence of the status-quo against any labor regulation that might have real teeth and help people get paid a fair wage.
If you change what’s essentially the dictionary definition of the product being sold, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Except it’s really just a rock.
A cash tip fixes this problem. I can't do anything about the business itself.
You're upset that the thing that solves a nice pain point for you and is very useful is doing it in a way that you find disagreeable. You don't yet have an alternative or at least it will take some amount of time and effort to find one and make the switch. You are voicing your dissatisfaction and dissapointment in the hope that the situation will be rectified and you won't have to go through the process of switching because it might be expensive (in some sense) to do so or there may be no alternative that you find compelling.
It's a two way street. If the company refuses to change and it upsets you enough, you need to move on. If you voice loud enough complaints and there are enough of them then it may cause the company to change.
Complaining is part of the mechanism that makes the system work.
For most companies I deal with I have no idea if they are doing shady things or not and I generally don't bother checking.
No such market with perfect competition exists, which leads to market externalities and the need for outside forces to get involved to correct (such as regulation).
Remember United Airlines? Yeah, neither does anyone else. Exxon Mobile? You’d first have to find out their local brand name. Etc etc